Getting "Fitted" at Leo’s Beach

I watched The Beach tonight. I had ordered it from Netflix, and it had been sitting on top of my DVD player for at least a week. I know that many people scoff at this movie, but several backpackers on the Bootsnall travel forum have said that seeing The Beach had inspired them to travel.

Well, after seeing it, I think that it’s up there with Brokedown Palace at the top of the list of movies that will scare you out of taking that upcoming trip to Thailand.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s character narrated the film, and at one point, he recited the following sentence:

I was the only one with the overview of how it all fitted together.

That sentence jolted me out of my happy movie-coma. Fitted?

It sounded terrible. However, the more I thought about it, the more I doubted myself. It was supposed to be fit, wasn’t it? Or was fitted an appropriate past participle?

I turned to my beloved Google, and found some interesting insights on this page:

Here’s the big picture. Germanic languages each have a handful of verbpairs (lie, lay; fall, fell) consisting of matched intransitive and transitivecounterparts sharing a common concept. The intransitives are irregular and thetransitives are regular. Transitive means having an noun object without need ofa preposition, as in “fell a tree”.English seems to have only four pairs left,and the pair shine/shine is iffy.

This observant linguist, DaleC, points out that “fitted” is acceptable when referring to an object: fitting a shoe, for example. I fitted the shoe against his foot.Since Leo was explaining a concept, rather than literally fitting an object, the word should have been fit, not fitted.

(You might be wondering if the screenwriters had intended for Leo’s character to use the word fitted, had intended for him to be incorrect. That might be true in other settings, but in this movie, I don’t think so. Leo spoke slowly, deliberately and with an intellectual air.)

I hope you have a good night.

If you’re in the mood for something weird, put on The Beach. I did enjoy it….but it was one of the stranger movies I’ve seen in recent memory. (If you want to see a truly fantastic film, rent Before Sunset, as long as you have seen Before Sunrise, of course. That movie knocked me over with its greatness.)

Unrelated to this current comment thread, I just read ANOTHER headline that does not make sense:

“Thanks to Michael Vick, Virginia Tech has a major image problem.”

I see “thanks” used in this fashion all the time.

BUT why is headline writer employing “thanks” when the situation is negative and lamentable? It seems to me that “thanks” should be used in a positive sense when something good has happened and deserves recognition.

Thus, more apt:(and can others comment here with more appropriate headline examples?)

I would disagree. I think the headline writers here are using “thanks” in the other sense of the word, which is “2 : to hold responsible (had only himself to thank for his loss)” (merriam webster) or “To hold responsible; credit: We can thank the parade for this traffic jam.” (american heritage), so that to say “Thanks to Michael Vick” is totally appropriate.

I know it seems weird but it’s because you are thinking of it from the definition of “showing gratitude” rather than “to hold responsible.” So yes, you would say, “Thanks to my husband’s inability to keep his hands off his assistant, we’re now divorced” or “Thanks to my tendency to be a scofflaw, I’m now doing time for shoplifting.” And yeah, it would be correct.

In a way, they are related. When you thank someone/show them gratitude, you are also acknowledging that they are responsible.

OK, I agree that it may technically be correct to use the word “thanks,” as you suggested, BUT there’s other ways to spin a sentence to avoid this situation. To me, it simply reads weird and is awful and is lazy to use “thanks” in this perspective.

Would you yourself rephrase a sentence or would you actually be comfortable in writing: “Thanks to my husband’s sleeping around, we’re now divorced”……..? I still think it would be more appropriate to write: “Given my husband’s problems related to fidelity, we’re now divorced.”